1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods of monitoring the production history of animal cuts, more particularly a method for determining the source and treatment of animals that are raised for slaughter for human consumption.
2. Prior Art
Livestock are typically bred at ranches or breeding farms. Once the animals reach a certain age and/or weight, they are weaned and leave the breeding farms and proceed to a feeding facility. The feeding facility rears the animals for a period of time before they are sent to feed lots or directly to packers for slaughter. After the animals have been slaughtered, the primal cuts from the animal are distributed by a processor and ultimately sold to consumers such as retailers.
Particularly in the production of lamb, there is little vertical integration between the processes conducted by each of the breeding farm, feeder facility, packer, processor and consumer. Breeders and feeders could improve the animal performance and realize greater gains with performance based compensation if there was greater cooperation between each of the stages within the industry.
Factors and variables that can effect the quality of the meat include the genetics of the animals bred, herd management, food supply (including foraging systems), water supply, health conditions and the like. A breeder maintains a herd of animals that are believed to exhibit acceptable traits for the meat industry and maintains the young animals until weaning with a goal of their acceptance by a feeder facility. However, the impact of a breeder's practices on meat quality is not clearly understood. A feeder facility can impact the rate of growth of its animals and can maintain their health while they are at the feeder facility, but the direct impact of these actions on the quality of the meat product is also unknown. In addition, there is a growing concern about quality assurance in the livestock processing cycle. Consumers (both retailers and individuals) seek assurances about the health and quality of meat products produced for human consumption. As such, there is an opportunity for producers and processors of livestock who can establish that the quality assurance procedures are in place within their industry segment.
In the lamb industry, there are typically four segments: the lamb breeder, the feeder, the packer and the processor. The breeder maintains a herd of sheep that are used to produce lambs. Ewes are bred to rams so that lambs are produced primarily for meat production with some lambs retained as replacements for the herd. The lambs are usually weaned from their mothers and transferred to a feeder facility at about two months of age. Typically, the main objectives of the breeder facility is to produce lambs that are healthy and vigorous with high weaning weights at the lowest cost and produce the best meat as determined by factors such as tenderness and taste at a low cost. The breeder is so removed from the consumer that the final meat quality is not known to the breeder. In most instances, the breeder can only determine the quality of the animals leaving its facility by their size (especially weight) and conformation (the visible physical characteristics of the portions of the lambs that will become primal cuts).
The feeder facility receives the lambs and feeds them for four to six months with the objective of adding weight at a reasonable pace while keeping the animals healthy. The feeder facility typically collects and uses information such as the identity of the animals, their beginning, ending and periodic weight measurements, water and food supplies, veterinary treatments such as vaccinations, as well as any other significant events that occurred during the animals' lives. Once the lambs reach a marketable weight of about 100 to 110 pounds, they are sold to a packer for slaughter. As is true for the breeders, the feeder facilities have limited tools for assessing the quality of the animals reared. Feeder facilities can assess animal size and conformation, as well as their health and nutrition to approximate their quality. The packer typically slaughters the animal and then chills, ages and cuts the carcass into various cuts of meats and packs those cuts for shipment to consumers. The packer has the opportunity to assess the quality of animals it receives. However, that information generally is not shared with breeders or feeders in a manner by which breeders or feeders can improve their processes to improve the meat quality.
In each of these four segments, the breeder, the feeder, the packer and the processor of cuts, have attempted to optimize their own operations. There has been relatively little emphasis on, or opportunity for cooperative optimization, efforts between these industry segments. However, there is a growing recognition across these industry segments that for both quality assurance reasons and for the improvement of the lamb industry in general, there is a need to improve the collection of data relating to the source and production of livestock in order to improve the quality of meat products and to instill consumer confidence in the meat production industry. While livestock producers and meat packers have a common goal of providing high quality meat at reasonable cost, there remains variability in production efficiency and meat quality. This variability in individual animal production efficiency and individual primal cut quality characteristics (such as weight, conformation, muscling, fat content, etc.) is due to a combination of genetic factors and environmental factors such as health and drug treatments, nutrition and growth history. Many of the genetic and environmental factors could be controlled and managed to improve quality and economic return on investment if accurate and historical information were available throughout the production cycle. While some data collection systems have been proposed to analyze data relating to livestock breeds in order to identify higher performance breeds, there remains a need for data collection on individual feeder facilities in order to improve and maintain the quality of animals reared, particularly in the lamb industry.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,569,092 to Guichon et al. describes a system for monitoring beef cattle throughout their life cycle. The method of the patent tracks tagged animals from conception at a ranch through to their feeding at a packer facility. The animals may be tagged by systems such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), or a global positioning satellite (GPS), or barcodes. In particular, the animals are tracked to determine if they have been exposed to a diseased animal or if they have been close to feeding or watering zones during their lifetimes. The quality of the meat produced is correlated to the time that the animals spend in a feeding or watering zone or near a diseased animal.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,211,789 to Oldham et al. describes a process to improve the quality and economic returns using accurate historical information on livestock. Animals are provided with electronic identification and data on the animals is manually entered into a database using identification codes for each animal. The animal producer fills out information regarding the treatment received by the animal such as its weight, treatments, vaccinations and other significant events that occur in the animal's life and submits it to a central processing office. The information can be shared with third parties such as veterinarians, nutritionists and investors.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,664,897 to Pape et al. describes a computerized data collection system for obtaining information on the events in animals lives. U.S. Pat. No. 6,642,946 to Janes et al. describes a livestock inventory system with a database storage wherein a user can select tables of a database to display in order to graphically show the inventory of livestock.
Despite these advances in livestock management, a need remains for a method of tracking the source of production of animal primal cuts on a detailed basis to provide a quality control system, as well as feedback of information to enhance the quality of the handling and processing of livestock.